On Wednesday 31 May 2006 11:32, George Beshers wrote:
Well, my thesis (many moons ago I assure you) was on syntax directed editors. I came to the conclusion that letting the user do what they want is a requirement, but that "heuristics" and other "smarts" were to be avoided on the grounds that at least for my implementation they were more trouble than they were worth. Thus I would avoid error correcting parsers unless you are very confident that the correction used is at least type-safe and that it is not "sticking things in" that are unwanted (or even more maddening removing what I just typed and which **was** what I wanted).
I certainly agree. I've ended up loathing any editor which unilaterally decides to change what I've typed. That _might_ be because they weren't done properly... maybe.
So my recommendation is that pointing out where the syntax and typing errors are without having to leave the editor would be great. Then the time required to actually make the corrections is minimal in terms of overall development time.
It might have been mentioned before but I think IntelliJ's 'Idea' does an excellent job as a java editor. It'd be worth looking at for... ideas, as it were. It doesn't automatically correct anything, when it detects an error it makes it obvious by highlighting the offending code, putting marks on the scrollbar and colouring an indicator. When the cursor is on an error you can hit a key-combo to bring up a list of potential remedial actions.
The "interesting" (graveyard laugh) problems revolve around editing a library and the program that uses it at the same time with a few obvious extensions. The "graveyard laugh" is because I rapidly found I needed transactions and as the implementation was in C++ it had some very nasty pointer issues going to and from disk. Performance was also an issue --- but that was a a pre-sparc SUN, M68020 w/ 4Meg of RAM if memory serves me correctly.
Idea is, more or less, transactional. It's 'refactorings' can affect multiple entities, and they're stored in a local history so you can rollback when you want to. I'm not sure it'd run too well on that sort of machine though. :) For what it's worth, I'd love a Haskell editor the likes of Idea (and better). Lots of refactory-goodness, auto-importing of functions, function suggestion from type, display of inferred types, etc, etc, etc Daniel